Postscript: Marie Colvin, 1956-2012

Last night, after a long day and before a late dinner, I sat down with my wife to watch the news on CNN. Anderson Cooper was broadcasting from a studio in New York, but his tape was from Syria. He rightly demanded that we watch a two-year-old child in the besieged city of Homs die of shrapnel wounds inflicted by the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The camera stayed on the child until the last breath was out of him. His father cradled him and kept asking what his poor son had ever done to anyone to deserve it.

Then Cooper spoke with a reporter—a very great and experienced reporter—who was on the scene, Marie Colvin, of the Sunday Times of London. The image of Colvin on the screen was instantly recognizable to anyone who has spent time reporting, as she had for a generation, from the Middle East, Africa, Chechnya, the Balkans, or South Asia; after losing an eye in the civil war in Sri Lanka, in 2001, she wore an eye patch. For decades, she has been a ubiquitous presence in the war zones of the world and her reports in the Times were admired in the close-knit world of foreign correspondents for their scrupulous and straightforward eloquence.

On the telephone from Homs, Colvin told Anderson that the death of the child was an emblem of the overall “reality” of what was happening in Homs:

These are twenty-eight thousand civilians, men, women and children, hiding, being shelled, defenseless. That little baby is one of two children who died today, one of the children being injured every day. That baby probably will move more people to think, “What is going on, and why is no one stopping this murder in Homs that is happening every day?”

Clearly, and without hype, Colvin described how every house in Homs had been hit, including the top floor of the house where she was taking refuge. There was cool but profound rage in her voice. Of Bashar al-Assad’s armed forces, Colvin said, “It’s a complete and utter lie they’re only going after terrorists. The Syrian Army is simply shelling a city of cold, starving civilians.”

Cooper remarked, admiringly, that it was rare to hear a journalist use the word “lie.”

Not long after, the sickening report from Syria ended. I mentioned to my wife that a decade ago, wandering with other journalists through Jenin, a West Bank city that had been ravaged during an Israeli military incursion, I’d met Colvin. She had taken up living in a small house, and when she saw me and a few more experienced colleagues walking down an empty street marked by tank tracks, shuttered shops, and spent ammunition, she recognized a fool at risk. She called me into the house—a strong, clear American voice—fed us, let me file from her miraculously still-working satellite phone, and gave good stern advice on how to get through town without getting detained. She’d made a life of this work; I was a relative rookie. She was generous and funny and knew precisely the risks she was running. When I came home and mentioned to more experienced reporters that I’d run into Marie Colvin, they all spoke of her as someone of genuine honesty, intelligence, and bravery.

After turning off the news and eating a late dinner, I read, watched a movie, and went to bed—but it was impossible to put that child, or Marie’s voice, out of my head.

This morning, we all woke to the news that Marie Colvin, as well as a French photographer, Rémi Ochlik, were dead. Just hours after that Syrian child, and so many others had died, she and Ochlik were killed by rocket fire in Homs. Colvin’s death comes less than a week after the death of Anthony Shadid, in Syria, near the Turkish border. (Jon Lee Anderson, who published his own remarkable report in this week’s New Yorker, was among the friends and family to celebrate Anthony at his funeral on Tuesday in Beirut.) And the news of their deaths comes at the same time as reports of a Syrian blogger, Rami al-Sayed, killed by rocket fire in Homs.

It is not yet clear if the Syrian government deliberately targeted the building in which Colvin and Ochlik, and a number of other journalists, were working. (The Times described it as a “makeshift media center.”) At least three other journalists were apparently injured in the same attack. All this suggests that the Assad regime may have begun a direct assault on the media, though that remains unclear. Many of the foreign reporters filing from Syria have done so after sneaking across the border.

Colvin would be the first to demand that we concentrate less on her own death than on the outrage of the Syrian Army, under the command of a tyrant too often described as a “mild-mannered” eye doctor, slaughtering its own people. And it is all being carried out with arms and diplomatic cover from Vladimir Putin.

Like Shadid, Colvin devoted her life—and gave her life—for the proposition that the truth of history demands witnesses. Her death, like Shadid’s, like that of so many others, is yet another reminder, as if any more were needed, that experience in the field is no shelter from disaster. In November 2010, at St. Bride’s Church in London, Colvin was one of the speakers at a service called Truth At All Costs to honor the hundreds of journalists who have died in war zones over the years. The Duchess of Cornwall was there. As ever, Colvin spoke best for herself as she described the essential place of war reporting and the inner calculus of risk. Here are a few paragraphs, but I would hope you will read it all:

Your Royal Highness, ladies and gentlemen, I am honored and humbled to be speaking to you at this service tonight to remember the journalists and their support staff who gave their lives to report from the war zones of the twenty-first century. I have been a war correspondent for most of my professional life. It has always been a hard calling. But the need for frontline, objective reporting has never been more compelling.

Covering a war means going to places torn by chaos, destruction, and death, and trying to bear witness. It means trying to find the truth in a sandstorm of propaganda when armies, tribes or terrorists clash. And yes, it means taking risks, not just for yourself but often for the people who work closely with you.

Despite all the videos you see from the Ministry of Defense or the Pentagon, and all the sanitized language describing smart bombs and pinpoint strikes, the scene on the ground has remained remarkably the same for hundreds of years. Craters. Burned houses. Mutilated bodies. Women weeping for children and husbands. Men for their wives, mothers children.

Our mission is to report these horrors of war with accuracy and without prejudice. We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story. What is bravery, and what is bravado?